Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. Even though she was just 22 when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation.

Modern Romance: An Investigation

At some point every one of us embarks on a journey to find love. We meet people, date, get into and out of relationships, all with the hope of finding someone with whom we share a deep connection. This seems standard now, but it's wildly different from what people did even just decades ago. Single people today have more romantic options than at any point in human history.

Alida Nugent graduated college with a degree in one hand and a drink in the other, eager to trade in parties and all-nighters for "the real world". But post-grad wasn't the glam life she imagined. Soon buried under a pile of bills, laundry, and three-dollar bottles of wine, it quickly became clear that she had no idea what she was doing. But hey, what twentysomething does?

Bad Feminist: Essays

A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay. In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking listeners on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown).

Why Not Me?

In Why Not Me? Kaling shares her ongoing journey to find contentment and excitement in her adult life, whether it's falling in love at work, seeking new friendships in lonely places, attempting to be the first person in history to lose weight without any behavior modification whatsoever, or, most important, believing that you have a place in Hollywood when you're constantly reminded that no one looks like you.

Like an urban Dian Fossey, Wednesday Martin decodes the primate social behaviors of Upper East Side mothers in a brilliantly original and witty memoir about her adventures assimilating into that most secretive and elite tribe. After marrying a man from the Upper East Side and moving to the neighborhood, Wednesday Martin struggled to fit in. Drawing on her background in anthropology and primatology, she tried looking at her new world through that lens, and suddenly things fell into place.

Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's 'Learned'

For readers or listeners of Nora Ephron, Tina Fey, and David Sedaris, this hilarious, poignant, and extremely frank collection of personal essays confirms Lena Dunham - the acclaimed creator, producer, and star of HBO's Girls - as one of the brightest and most original writers working today.

Amazon Customer says:"Some interesting parts, but on the whole... meh"

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you; you lose a family member; you can’t pay the bills. And it can be great: you’ve had the hottest sex of your life; you get that plum job; you muster the courage to write your novel. Sugar—the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus, now revealed as Cheryl Strayed, author of the best-selling memoir Wild—is the person thousands turn to for advice. Tiny Beautiful Things gathers the best of "Dear Sugar" in one place and includes never-before-published columns.

Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why she - along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing - remains unmarried.

Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps

If you graduated from college but still feel like a student...if you wear a business suit to job interviews but pajamas to the grocery store...if you have your own apartment but no idea how to cook or clean...it's OK. But it doesn't have to be this way. Just because you don't feel like an adult doesn't mean you can't act like one. And it all begins with this funny, wise, and useful book. Based on Kelly Williams Brown's popular blog, Adulting makes the scary, confusing "real world" approachable, manageable - and even conquerable.

How to Start a Fire

When UC Santa Cruz roommates Anna and Kate find passed-out Georgianna Leoni on a lawn one night, they wheel her to their dorm in a shopping cart. Twenty years later they gather around a campfire on the lawn of a New England mansion. What happens in between - the web of wild adventures, unspoken jealousies, and sudden tragedies that alter the courses of their lives - is charted with sharp wit and aching sadness in this meticulously constructed novel.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (Oprah's Book Club 2.0)

At 22, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State - and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.

New Life, No Instructions: A Memoir

What do you do when the story changes in midlife? When a tale you have told yourself turns out to be a little untrue, just enough to throw the world off-kilter? It’s like leaving the train at the wrong stop: You are still you, but in a new place, there by accident or grace, and you will need your wits about you to proceed.

You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up: A Love Story

Actress, producer, and acclaimed writer Annabelle Gurwitch—once fired from a play by Woody Allen—can find humor in any situation. Here she teams with her husband, Jeff Kahn, for a funny look at the ups and downs of marriage.

One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

B.J. Novak's One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories is an endlessly entertaining, surprisingly sensitive, and startlingly original debut that signals the arrival of a brilliant new voice in American fiction. A boy wins a $100,000 prize in a box of Frosted Flakes - only to discover how claiming the winnings might unravel his family. A woman sets out to seduce motivational speaker Tony Robbins - turning for help to the famed motivator himself. A new arrival in Heaven, overwhelmed with options, procrastinates over a long-ago promise to visit his grandmother....

Landline

Georgie McCool knows her marriage is in trouble. That it’s been in trouble for a long time. She still loves her husband, Neal, and Neal still loves her, deeply - but that almost seems beside the point now. Maybe that was always beside the point. Two days before they’re supposed to visit Neal’s family in Omaha for Christmas, Georgie tells Neal that she can’t go. She’s a TV writer, and something’s come up on her show; she has to stay in Los Angeles. She knows that Neal will be upset with her - Neal is always a little upset with Georgie - but she doesn’t expect to him to pack up the kids and go without her.

Everything I Never Told You: A Novel

Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet.… So begins the story in this exquisite debut novel about a Chinese American family living in a small town in 1970s Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue When Lydia's body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together tumbles into chaos.

Stronger

Jeff Bauman woke up on Tuesday, April 16th, 2013, and he had no legs. Just 30 hours prior, Jeff was surrounded by revelry at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon. The first bomb went off at his feet as he awaited his girlfriend's finish. When Jeff awoke days later from hours of surgery, rather than take stock of his now completely altered life, Jeff ripped out his breathing tube and tried to speak. He couldn't. Jeff asked for a pad and paper and he wrote down seven words, "Saw the guy. Looked right at me," setting off one of the biggest manhunts in the country's history....

The Empathy Exams: Essays

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other?

The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion

It's a report tempered by hard times. In "Matricide", Daum unflinchingly describes a parent's death and the uncomfortable emotions it provokes; and in "Diary of a Coma" she relates her own journey to the twilight of the mind. But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the marriage-industrial complex, of the New Age dating market, and of the peculiar habits of the young and digital.

We Were Liars

A beautiful and distinguished family. A private island. A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy. A group of four friends - the Liars - whose friendship turns destructive. A revolution. An accident. A secret. Lies upon lies. True love. The truth. We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from National Book Award finalist and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart.

The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - and How to Make the Most of Them Now

Our "30-is-the-new-20" culture tells us that the twentysomething years don't matter. Some say they are an extended adolescence. Others call them an emerging adulthood. But 30 is not the new 20. In this enlightening book, Dr. Meg Jay reveals how many twentysomethings have been caught in a swirl of hype and misinformation that has trivialized what are actually the most defining years of adulthood.

Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change

Written by the originators and leaders of the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) movement itself, this short, practical audio guide offers an approach to organizational change based on the possibility of a more desirable future, experience with the whole system, and activities that signal "something different is happening this time." That difference systematically taps the potential of human beings to make themselves, their organizations, and their communities more adaptive and more effective.

Men Explain Things to Me

In Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit takes on the conversations between men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don't. The ultimate problem, she shows in her comic, scathing essay, is female self-doubt and the silencing of women. Rebecca Solnit is the author of fourteen books about civil society, popular power, uprisings, art, environment, place, pleasure, politics, hope, and memory, most recently The Faraway Nearby, a book on empathy and storytelling.

Publisher's Summary

Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash.

As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her unforgettable last essay for the Yale Daily News, "The Opposite of Loneliness", went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. She had struck a chord.

Even though she was just 22 when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. The Opposite of Loneliness is an assem­blage of Marina's essays and stories that, like The Last Lecture, articulates the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world.

What the Critics Say

"Keegan brings self-awareness to the collective insecurity of her peers even as she captures it with a precision that only comes from someone who feels it too. How unfortunate that she will never know the value readers will find in her work." (Publishers Weekly)

Some news stories one reads and then simply forgets. But when recent Yale grad Marina Keegan was killed in a car accident on Cape Cod in mid-2012, I found her story unforgettable. From all accounts, she was embarking on her adult life full of promise and with pure joie de vivre. So, when I learned her essays had been published, I was eager to read them. I found her essays as vivid and full of life as Ms. Keegan had been portrayed. And while I found the book interesting and enjoyable, I couldn't help but feel an abiding sadness that this talented woman's life had been cut short at such a young age. I found Emily Woo Zeller's narration to be lovely and spot on... a beautiful tribute to a life lost too soon.

I enjoyed this mix of short stories and essays, especially the essays. The reader learns that the author, Marina Keegan, died tragically shortly after graduating from Yale. With death the theme of both some essays and stories, that fact sadly does give this book more power. Keegan's stories are best when the main characters are 20-somethings like herself. They have an authentic feel, and she is a talented young writer. Her essays are all personal, making them so strong. She drew me into about half her short stories and all of her essays. My children are all 20-somethings, and this book both was enjoyable but also gave me more insight into the world of my kids. I have some criticisms with the audiobook. You start with one essay, followed by all the stories and then all the essays. There is almost no pause between one story and the next. A different voice reading story titles would have helped. Personally, I would have liked to have essays and short stories alternating. While the reader is good, and this was en enjoyable book to hear, it might be even better to read.

Every once in a while a talent comes along which is prematurely taken from us. Marina Keegan is one such talent. Only 22 years old, she had an uncanny ability to capture the spirit of the young and the wisdom of the old. While listening to her stories, I was transported back in time to a point in my life where I was full of hope and optimism while reflecting on the experience and wisdom that has come with living life's adventures. Her story about her Toyota in "Stability in Motion" made me laugh as it brought back memories about my first vehicle - a 1970 Volkswagen Camper.Emily Zeller does an outstanding job of narration. It is as if Marina herself is reading the stories to me in my car. Couple great narration with great writing and you get one hell of an audio book!Marina has truly left her mark on this world through her writing. One sad aspect of Marina's untimely death is that we must live in this world without being able to read another word crafted by her.

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